The Crisis, April 1916

I'm just jotting down a few thoughts on this issue here, there's so much more to say.

The editorial section contains an account of a lynching in Lee County, Georgia, including a graphic photograph. Here's the take: "What was the real cause back of this wholesale lynching and back of the lynching of six Negroes in Early County, December 30th? The answer is clear: Peonage. Slavery under another name..." (302). A man named C. D. Rivers from Somerville, VA is then quoted, as apparently he wrote a letter to some newspaper to explain why things are so bad in Georgia. Du Bois catches him in his own rhetoric, showing that Rivers' justification of lynching is based on profits, not morals. 

I grew up southeast of Somerville, a town so small it almost doesn't exist now. Just a store on a corner.

This is immediately followed by a supportive letter from Helen Keller, who also sent one hundred dollars along for the NAACP along with it.

I noticed these things, there are many more, with a lean toward coverage of religious affairs due to this being the Easter special issue. There's a new section titled "The Looking Glass," which seems to be halfway between "Along the Color Line" with its news snippets and the long-form essays and articles that appear from time to time. It's an extended digest of news and events.

Last, here's an image of the "automobile phalanx" against segregation in St. Louis.

The New Age, April 6, 1916

"Man and Manners" continues. I'm more and more certain that Hastings is behind it--this week, it includes a characteristic castigation of women's writing in general. At first, I'm all set to groan, as the passage opens "If it were not for the feminine label on the cover it would usually be difficult to decide whether the writer of a book is a woman or a second-rate man" (542). However, the anonymous author works her way around to making a feminist argument, one that first appeared in D. Triformis, way back in 1910 or so (not going to look it up right at the moment): that women need to stop writing like second rate men, and start writing like women. Check it out:

"Why? Is it to draw men’s approval and praise? I appeal for a new race of women-writers to right the wrong, and to portray people and things as women see them. Men have written themselves up to such an uncorrected extent that we (and they) have got into the habit of taking them at their own value, as though their standards were rules for the Day of Judgment. Again, I say, there are no women-writers. If there had been--hear me while I whisper--this diary of mine would never have been made--public!" (543)

That's amazing! And heading right into the dissertation. 

One quick note: Bechofer seems to be pastiching the master of pastiche this week in "Impressions of Russia," mocking Hastings' "Impressions of Paris" and other contemporaries. At least that's my first impression. 

That's all for now...

The Masses, April 1916

The Masses has been one of my favorites among the periodicals that I've been reading for some time now--I appreciated its blend of serious politics and humor. Students like it for the same reasons, and it is a good text for discussions on American politics in the nineteen teens.

So, it's terrible when it is racist.

The author of the poem is one Jane Burr, a pseudonym of Rosalind Guggenheim Winslow. The poem is an utterly demeaning account of her African American nurse. Often when I see racism in The Masses it's possible to figure out why it's there--a political cartoon that tries to use racial stereotypes to undermine the rhetoric of racism, but that instead ends up repeating the stereotypes. That sort of thing. That's bad enough. This poem is worse. I'm not going to quote it here because I don't have the stomach for it.

Max Eastman knows better--how could this poem appear in the same issue as this image, for instance:

The poem is a different kind of slumming, rural slumming, perhaps. It's the sort of thing The Masses should deplore. After all, this is the same journal that campaigned against lynching, enough to get accolades from The Crisis and to infuriate the southern white press. The Masses promotes books by Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, and appeared with Du Bois in The New Review, which was advertised in The Masses, in an ad that set them side by side in a list of contributors (January 1913, page 19, for instance):

The New Review included an essay by Du Bois criticizing the socialist tendency to exclude people of color from the socialist program in February 1913 (here's a link that should open a pdf of that issue of The New Review).

So what gives? The New York Times ran a story on Burr on August 3, 1913. It's the best source about her I've found so far. Here's the lede:

The New York Times holds up this feminist from a privileged background as a curiosity. The article makes much of the fact that she works in an office, because otherwise she'd bake cakes instead of writing poems (Burr/Winslow says this herself). NYT is also somewhat bewildered by the fact that she's married but believes in divorce. They also mention that her husband, Horatio Gates Winslow, was the original editor of The Masses (Eastman took over in December 1912), and that she gives them poems for free (while the NYT has to pay).

So maybe the picture comes into focus a bit. Burr/Winslow is a friend of the magazine. I don't know if the fact that she supports herself via poetry means she has no independent means, but I'm curious if she's also a benefactor of The Masses. So they print her poem. Still doesn't make much sense to me, and I'll see if I can learn more about it. This post isn't really enough of an analysis--as many of these, it's more of an annotation than an argument. I hope I can come back to this some day. And in the meantime, I'll think about what I'm reading and writing, and why I talk about certain texts and not others. I may be belatedly grouchy with The Masses, which at first struck me as misplaced in history--but I think this particular failure feels very recent. 

The New Age, March 23 1916

I'm currently wrapping up a dissertation chapter on The New Age which is why I'm posting so exclusively about it lately. That, and I know Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings, the main subject of my chapter, is going to take April off from writing for TNA, at least judging by my MJP search results for Alice Morning as author. There may yet be some things hidden in there, and I'll look for them, but I want to write about Morning while I can.

That said, there's only a few small things I'll note right now about this issue. Morning/Hastings continues "Men and Manners," and this week she comments on the scandal over D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow. The puritans are condemned as hypocrites for privately enjoying the novel, while publicly reviling it. In some ways that's rich, coming from Hastings--but it's also been her position for a long time that puritanism ruins fiction.

R.H.C. continues his reboot of his novel, now titled "Seventh Tale for Men Only," which I'm beginning to suspect is a fictionalized account of his relationship with Hastings--the main character, Doran, has been led by philosophy to fall in love with a mysterious dark liberated moon-woman. I'll keep reading it and see what happens.

Imagine  my disappointment: the Pastiche art column of the week says it has a poem by H.D. in it! But it's some other H.D.

More on The New Age and others soon! I should be dissertating more than blogging, though.

The New Age, March 16, 1916

 S. Verdad summarizes the battle of Verdun on page 460. Most of my post will be about literature, but it's a reminder that The New Age is appearing against the backdrop of history. Verdad correctly predicts that Verdun will hold.

R.H.C.'s "Readers and Writers" is the most exciting piece in this issue--he moves from speculating on whether Shakespeare was a particular individual or a collaboration to considering literary collaboration more generally, dropping some big hints to the collaborative nature of The New Age: 

"Still more to the point and the date, I know (and so do you) a weekly journal of some reputation

for smart writing in the country, of which all the articles received and accepted for publication undergo an editorship the effect of which is to make them indistinguishable from one another in style. Nay, I have seen one such article before and after this collaboration had been practised upon it; and, upon my life, you could not tell the second from a good translation of the first" (470). 

He follows Shakespeare with Milton, criticizing Milton's logic while applauding his energy. I'm thinking the discussion of rhetoric could possibly be useful for student papers, as R.H.C. accuses Milton of many freshman mistakes that persist to this day. Might be fun? 

Elsewhere, Orage/R.H.C. resume the novel "Tales for Men Only" as "Seventh Tale for Men Only," a blending of fiction and criticism of Ibsen. I'll follow along as it continues. 

Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning continue the anonymous "Men and Manners," including a funny parody of Pound's "Don'ts" titled "Don'ts in Polite Conversation." Many are still relevant. She/they also continue their fantasy novella, now seemingly titled "As It Fell Out," but I'm less and less interested in it. 

More on The New Age soon...

The Masses, February 1916

I haven't done a post on the Masses in a while, but I've been reading along. Here's one on the February, 1916 issue. I had my class read this issue last week, so it's particularly vivid in my mind, as the students here at UW really liked it, and we learned a ton together by digging through articles,  ads, and art.

Three featured articles caught our collective eye.

The first is John Reed's report from the Serbian front of the war, titled, "The World Well Lost." Reed opens with a beautiful and horrible parody of travel writing:

"THE Serbian town of Obrenovatz is a cluster of red tile roofs and white bulbous towers, hidden in green trees on a belt of land, around which sweeps the river Sava in a wide curve. Behind rise the green hills of Serbia, toppling up to blue ranges of mountains upon whose summit heaps of dead bodies lie still unburied, among the stumps of trees riddled down by machine-gun fire; and half-starved dogs battle there ghoulishly with vultures" (5).

Reed's embedded in the Serbian army, a staunchly nationalist force. When the soldiers hear that he is a socialist, they send him to the artillery to meet a former Serbian socialist officer there. Reed's interview with this man, Takits, shows the damage that the war can do to both a country and to a left-wing individual. Takits often refers to the fact that he can barely remember his activism, despite it being hugely important to him. He explains that socialism was a natural fit in Serbia, as a nation of freeholding peasants, "we were naturally communists." His original goal was to develop a sense of class loyalty among the lower classes to match that of the upper classes, because the lower classes already owned the means of production. The war has pushed all that into the background: "Well, I have forgotten my arguments, and I have lost my faith!" Takit's tragedy is that an intellectual, committed leftist lawyer could be so completely subsumed by the war as to lose his individuality. It's a cautionary tale for American socialists who are reading The Masses. 

The second text that we discussed was "The A.F. of L. Convention: An Impression" by Inez Haynes Gillmore. As my class has spent a lot of time discussing impressionism and post-impressionism, we were impressed by Gillmore's invocation of "impression" in the title, and discussed how framing it as an impression changes the reader's expectations of the piece. The account itself is joyous about the power of the labor delegates, who are sketched as super strong huge hunky brilliant men arguing intelligently over issues that will change the world. Students hypothesized that the female feminist readership of The Masses would have appreciated the woman's vision of male beauty here, so unusual after our many encounters with male representations of women in the course. Gillmore's writing is poetic and powerful: "The voice of labor is a roar, deep as though it came from a throat of iron, penetrating as though it came through lips of silver. One day that voice will silence all the great guns of the world."


Third piece: "About Schools" by Max Eastman. Eastman comments on the plan to adopt the Gary educational system in New York. He's writing to convince his left-wing audience that the plan is a good one, despite its concessions to religion. The Gary plan involves adding workshops to schools, intense shop class, essentially. Eastman writes that his own education was largely useless, and that he learned versatility and self-reliance at his first factory jobs, not in high school. We got the sense that Eastman sees the potential for worker's solidarity here--if everyone works in a factory as part of their schooling, they will have more sympathy with people who work in factories for life. That's implicit, though, a theory. Students appreciated this cartoon that accompanies the piece:

The caption reads: "Let's go out to Central Park and look at the animals." "I can't, I've got to study my zoology." We discussed how this is funny, a critique of current educational systems, and simultaneously a validation of women's ability to be serious students of sciences. Pretty good, for a single image.

There's more, but that's all for now...

The New Age, February 17, 1916

A quick post on the seventeenth--I'm going to push through a flurry in the closing days of this month, so there may well be a few more posts in the next couple days.

Hastings continues both "Men and Manners" and the story that began as "Feminine Fables," with the current iteration titled "Ropes of Sand."

"Men and Manners" is more interesting to me this week: the strange brew of Hastings-style feminism/anti-feminism is on full display (page 374). I'll walk through it here. Joan and Harry are having a fight. Harry is mad because Joan won't speak, and Joan won't speak because she's convinced that Harry won't understand. Here we go:

"Here, snapshot as it was, I saw one of the perennial complaints of men and women against each other-on woman’s side, man’s inability to see from the woman’s point of view; on man’s woman’s silence."

When the author of "Men and Manners" gets Joan to explain herself, here's Joan's point of view:

"DO you think Harry would waste his time trying to explain a joke to a man without a sense of humour? Then, what’s the use of my putting the woman’s case to a man without a sense of woman?"

That's cool, feminism of the gap. But the author answers Joan:

"S’pose so, said I ; but doesn’t that partly come about because women are so unfair to each other?" She goes on: "That’s where I blame women. If they were sex-loyal enough to found an institution similar to the Trade Union that exists among men for the protection of man against the wiles of woman, things would be very different. As it is, thanks (for nothing) to the spirit of rivalry among them, women are like a city divided against itself, and they fall at each other’s hands."

Again, cool: women need to build solidarity to counter the power of the patriarchy, or something like that. Next stop:

"Well personally, I blame both men and women for it. In the interest of general justice men should try to acquire this sense of woman (which Joan analogised with a sense of humour), and it is only by talking to women that they will learn it. Women again, should do their best to help men to acquire it, by at least trying to put the woman’s point of view before them. Necessity gives power, and if women would only begin to talk I wouldn’t be a bit surprised should they discover, after a trial or two (patience, please, men!) that they could ! Indeed, they might find that all the time they had been playing- rabbit to his weasel. Had they but known it, they could have outstripped the brute any day!"

We end up roughly here at the end of the article: women fall back on silence as their primary weapon, because men have no "sense of woman" that will allow them to understand women. The solution is not more silence, but more communication. Women will attain eloquence through engagement and building relationships with men, not by remaining in isolation. Note, though, the sexism that is like the sugar on the pill in phrases like "patience, please, men!" All this also has to be taken in the context of the opening of the piece, which made much fun of presumptuous women that hang around cafes.

Quick notes:

Max Nordau appears in translation, defending Germans from the snide comments of the French press, and appealing to moderation of racial profiling between nations.

Another Max: Max Jacob writes an article on French literature, ending by declaring himself "a champion of Art for Art's sake" if that is understood to mean art that represents, rather than declares.

This from Orage/R.H.C. on modernism and Dostoevsky: "Dostoievsky was a remarkable thinker even above the remarkable writer. The Pushkin address, in particular, appears to me to be decisive of his rank; for in it-and thirty years ago now-he diagnosed the sickness of intellectualism as pride. More, even, he anticipated in several other respects the judgments elsewhere being passed in these pages (by my respected colleagues Mr. de Maeztu and “T. E. H.”) on modernism, even before it was modern" (372)